It is my 3rd week in Nairobi and I realized the only place I knew was Kilimani (west central of Nairobi), the county where my Office and my house is located. I decided to explore the city with two of my FMS buds, Catharine and Jonathan. We took a tour round downtown Nairobi.
I started the week with the enthusiasm that we had reached and exceeded our goal of the number of applications we aimed to receive for the program. We started evaluating the quality of the entrepreneurs in our pipeline and we felt we might need to get more stronger applicants into the program. The team tried contacting some of these applicants that had participated in the information sessions or that we had earlier contacted but had not applied. We encouraged them to turn in their applications. Some of them did and other did not for reasons best known to them.
Now that we have the pipeline of entrepreneurs sorted out, the team moved on to start looking into recruiting investors and mentors that will be willing to commit their time and expertise to the program for free. In my opinion, I think this might be quite a challenge because the culture of giving back once time for free is still quite foreign. So far we have succeeded in drawing up a list of potential individuals we think might be a good fit. In the coming week we will contact and hope to convince them to take part in the program.
We rounded off the week by moving to the evaluation phase. I was responsible for evaluating 42 of the applications we had received. This process is aimed at evaluating the enterprises based on certain criteria we had developed to help reduce the volume of applications to the top 40 semi finalists. I enjoyed getting to know more about these enterprises through their applications some have really interesting and innovative start-ups that has started generating revenue but hasn’t broken even, some have very promising ideas/concepts which are about to be piloted and the remaining applicants still have a very long way to go.
